Since it becomes increasingly difficult for the traditional machine tools to meet the needs of market, the computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools have progressively become the tendency of the development of high-end CNC machine tools. They have the intellectual features of higher processing quality and efficiency, stronger self-adaptation control, higher reliability, greater network integration ability, and better dynamic adaptability.
Intelligent control is a process for controlling a machine to perform a task assigned by human independently or by interacting with human, so as to automatically achieve its goals. When applying intelligent control in the machinery manufacturing, fuzzy mathematics, neural network or other methods are applied to build a dynamic environment model for the manufacturing process, and sensor integration technology is used for information processing and integration. This helps to solve the problems of hard-to-predict or impossible-to-predict circumstances relying on the incomplete or inaccurate data.
At present, there have been researches on the utilization of the intelligent control technique to achieve excellent and high-efficient processing of a machine tool. For example, in order to improve the machining efficiency and quality, the Chinese Patent No. CN 202448022U provides a honing machine with an intelligent control system including an automatic feeding device and an on-line measurement device, which can dynamically display machining states and automatically compensate and correct dynamic error caused by various interferences by the configuration of a pressure/grating sensor and the connection with a microcontroller. The Chinese Patent No. CN 1349877A/CN 1128040C provides an intelligent cutter bar having dynamic characteristics of the electro-rheological material, which can be on-line adjusted quickly. The cutter bar can quickly predict the chattering in cutting based on a cutting vibration signal, and timely adjust the dynamic characteristics of the cutting system on-line based on the information contained in an acceleration signal. As another example, for energy-saving control, the Patent No. JP 5083476 B1 has disclosed a numerical control apparatus adapted to control the energy consumption of peripherals of the machine tool, in which a power consumption calculating unit is configured to calculate power consumption of the peripherals of the machine tool, and a state monitoring unit is configured to monitor control signals of the input and output of the PLC of the machine tool to turn off the peripherals. The U.S. Pat. No. 8,362,655 B2 provides a method for reducing the energy consumption of a machine, and an apparatus for reducing the energy consumption of a machine based on the method, which includes a deactivation device and a monitoring device. The deactivation device is predefined with a deactivation rule, which emits deactivation signals in response to a corresponding deactivation event generated by the machine, and the machine will be controlled to switch to an energy-saving mode once the monitoring device detects the deactivation signal.
Thus, it can be seen that the above patents mainly focus on the optimization of individual components of the machine tool and the transformation of control ways. However, the machine tools differ from each other, and their internal structures and input-output interfaces are not the same. In addition, the task performed by the machine tool varies according to the performance and processing technology of the machine tool. Thus, the above existing devices or systems cannot meet the needs of application extension.